Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Love songs by Mouse

A team from Washington University headed by Tim Holy and Zhongsheng Guo has discovered that male mouse sing ultrasonic love songs as part of the courtship rites.Mice now joins the exclusive club of mammals that can sing, which has until now has been the preserve of only human beings, bats and cetaceans. The discovery was quite accidental. The scientists were dabbling with pheromones. When the males encountered a swab with pheromones they broke into song. The details have been published in the scientific journal PLoS Biology.